Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

I always enjoy the amplification effect of marketing having a stake in rebrands has on how they're talked about. Company I worked at subtly changed colors and minor change to the font (a real font had come out in the interim). We had so much internal comms about it, and happy hours were planned well in advance of launch. Almost none of the engineers noticed the difference at all. But we'll launch major features with less fanfare.

View on HN

The real question is how much was spent between rework, those happy hours, and the branding consultants that made it happen?

The answer would likely make you sick – I'm fairly familiar with one rebranding that changed a serifed blue logotype to a sans-serifed green logotype with a total outlay nearing seven figures.

When you’re spending money on a Pentagram branding, you’re spending money to be noticed by a rarefied New York corporate elite. You invite them to those launch cocktail parties, your consultants are dating people who work for them, the rework tells a story your PR people put into something - a Tweet, a cocktail party conversation, a headline in Apple News - that they read. Michael Beirut goes to a lot of parties, he’s out there being noticed, he’s putting his work into a specific, non-public zeitgeist. It is trickle down and it is real.

A rebranding is more like a corporate version of the event where a couple restates their vows. It does a lot of work even if it is difficult to articulate as ROI positive, and the qualitative benefits are proportional to how extremely rich you are.

It's their version of constantly tinkering with which tools we use or switching up the Vim configuration.

Well.... At least it's slightly less destructive/annoying than when the UI/UX engineers get bored...

It’s probably subtle to you but not to other people, especially people outside your industry. I notice even the smallest pixel offset or the tiniest color change, but I can barely smell a rose, but that’s why I became a designer and programmer instead of becoming a chef. I’m speaking from experience presenting minor color changes to a fellow programmer versus maybe a product owner. I understand this is the same experience my friends feel when they try to show me the smell of a flower and my only response is “well it smells nice like any other flower.”

I am genetically incapable of the same experience.

Just a tangent, but I wonder if your lackluster sense of smell is actually genetic or if it is something that could be developed with effort.

Because there are a lot of foods or smells that are "acquired". So I wonder if you took conscious effort to smell and "savor" (for lack of a better term) different types of flowers, if you would actually start to notice the differences and subtleties.

My sense of smell is just really weak. I can barely even detect the smell. I’ve never smelled a strong flower and I run a home garden.

I’ve done wine tastings and what not as well and I can’t really tell apart anything.

It’s funny because people say I’m a good cook but I bet I overload my dishes with spices more than I need to.

One of the big differences between professional cooks and home cooks is that home cooks tend to under-season things. So maybe your over compensation works out for you.

Seems like the best testament to a well-done rebrand is that you don't need a thousand word blog post explaining it.

Yev from Backblaze here -> absolutely, the blog post was mostly intended to dive into the "how" we came to some of our decisions, for those interested and having never gone through one of these before!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com